The Great Looney Tunes Caper of 2010
by Roseveare
Summary: Haven has become a cartoon. Audrey would like to solve this Trouble... if she only can rein in the antics of Detective Numbty and his arch nemesis Duke Crooked long enough to try. OT3 case fic.


TITLE: The Great Looney Tunes Caper of 2010  
AUTHOR: roseveare  
RATING: PG13  
LENGTH: 11,500 words  
SUMMARY: Haven has become a cartoon. Audrey would like to solve this Trouble... if she only can rein in the antics of Detective Numbty and his arch nemesis Duke Crooked long enough to try.  
NOTES: Rare pair fic exchange. Audrey/Duke/Nathan.  
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.

* * *

**The Great Looney Tunes Caper of 2010**

Audrey woke up alone with a deep sense of foreboding.

She sat up and cursed, pushing away the sheets that had been only sort of arranged around her. The dents Duke and Nathan had lain in, that had marked the mattress of Nathan's (small, uncomfortable) bed, were not even warm with remnant body heat.

A break-out of Duke's low, hearty laughter sounded from downstairs, accompanied by Nathan's much rarer (very rare) high-pitched hoot, that only came out when he really lost control. Faintly in the wake of both, she detected the familiar voice of a cartoon farmer saying, "Shh! I'm hunting _wabbits_."

Audrey sighed and rolled her eyes. She was starting to suspect that cartoons in the morning was the only reason Duke ever tried to push the idea they should overnight at Nathan's place. It definitely wasn't the bed, which was as hard as might be expected from a guy who couldn't feel the aches it was inflicting. Not the food, or the decor, either. Audrey perched on the end of the bed and listened to the laughter downstairs.

Sometimes this arrangement actually felt like she was dating a couple of eight year olds.

She got up. The positive side was that she could go cuddle in between them on the sofa, and there'd already be coffee on, and maybe breakfast. At heart, though, Audrey was just not a cartoons person. She felt like there was something she intrinsically didn't get about cartoons. To her, they all seemed the same: Lurid violence and mockeries of people who simply _never learned_. They weren't funny, they were sad. She always wanted the cat to eat the annoying budgie, and the farmer to feast on rabbit pie for dinner, and the coyote to outfox the road runner and leave a big pile of blue feathers fluttering all over the road. It was more like some existential expression of frustration and the futility of life than entertainment.

Nathan had rows of them on his DVD shelves.

They weren't all Looney Tunes. He had older stuff and more obscure stuff and a bunch of foreign stuff. Audrey did not mind anime. Nathan didn't _have_ anime. It was like he'd deliberately tailored his collection to irritate her.

She padded down to join them in her pyjama bottoms and a cami top. It was a nice morning, the sun filtering through the windows making even the interior of Nathan's sparse home pleasant. She picked up a cup and a plate from the kitchen, and ducked her head into the room, although she already knew what she was going to find. The music was fairly distinctive.

Nathan and Duke were sprawled on the sofa, Nathan half across Duke's lap, Duke had a loose arm curled around Nathan's middle and played with his hair, trying to make it stick up all over. It was possible Nathan was unaware he was doing this. But they were relaxed and grinning, and gave the general impression, as usual, of being too large to be wrapped up together. It was... very cute. The sort of moment Audrey wanted to take a snap of and pin up on the police station noticeboard, except if she started that game, they had too many opportunities for dirt on her, too.

"Hey, good morning, guys." She walked in to Elmer Fudd's most operatic rendition of _Kill The Wabbit_ filling the room, and her cheery morning greeting got shushed. She pouted and climbed on the unoccupied end of the sofa and poked at them both with her bare toes. Nathan jerked at the contact. Cold, huh? Audrey grinned with evil intent.

When the cartoon finished and they started acknowledging her again, she stopped torturing Nathan with her cold feet, eyerolled and accused, "Sometimes I feel like you'd rather have your cartoons in the morning than _me_."

Duke offered her an enthusiastic round of morning kissing in apology.

"That's not true," he said, rising out of a lock with her lips. Nathan had gone a bit pink at the accusation. He didn't need to worry, though - Audrey was just screwing with them, and she knew that it was one thing they shared that she didn't... other than their abrasive history.

"I'm going to hit the shower," Nathan said, slinging a leg over Duke to climb out. He sort of half got up, stopping to straddle Duke and kiss him as he rose. He got the DVD from the player and put it back in the box and back on the shelf in true OCD collector fashion, then tossed the TV remote into the no-man's land between Duke and Audrey. They pounced at the same time, but Audrey won. Duke groaned as she switched on the news. Nathan leaned down and kissed her, too, on his way out of the room. "I know you have the Berridge case to follow-up on this morning. No need to wait for me."

He left, and Duke and Audrey looked war at each other over the distant sound of running water. "It's _Wellbeing Wednesdays_ on the Karma Network," Duke said.

"That doesn't exist!" Audrey was fairly sure.

The centre of the sofa turned into the arena for a vicious toe fight. Having already thoroughly cowed Nathan on that battlefield, Audrey was determined not to be defeated now. He got around her by cheating - meaning _tickling_, the evil fiend - which then turned into a foot massage as Duke maybe realised he'd gone a step too far. The increasing threats of murder in between her helpless giggles were probably what alerted him.

By the time they really did have to go, Audrey realised she hadn't caught a single headline.

* * *

They snuck out together while Nathan was still moving around upstairs. That was also part of the routine - the drawback of Nathan's place, aside from the bed, was the nosy and prudish middle-class neighbours. For that reason, it was Audrey's much more anonymous little car outside, and not Duke's truck, and they sped silently across Nathan's lawn to it like ninjas, hunkered down and watchful for spies. They leaped in and sped off, leaving Nathan's way-too-tidy neighbourhood behind.

Even if he didn't get it in the ear for illicit three-way sexual shenanigans, sooner or later Nathan was going to get lynched by his neighbours for not keeping the front lawn mowed to the requisite level. Maybe they needed a gardening session before that happened.

Audrey and Duke showered together above the _Gull_. Then Duke went downstairs to work and Audrey got back in her car. She had a couple of doorstep interviews to do that morning, which she hadn't managed to complete the day before.

Not every problem in Haven could be supernatural, alas, and on this occasion the problem was, in fact, about a cat. It was one of those times when Audrey felt keenly the whiplash of transitioning from FBI work to small town police work. Troubles had been quiet for a week or so, and she had her suspicions that Nathan had suggested she take the case with the cat out of humour. Any remark to that effect earned her suffering looks and comments on how he had to catch up on paperwork, shuffling the papers in his hands morosely to underline the point.

The cat in question was a mean ginger called Fontaine, which liked to chase dogs. It belonged to Mrs. Berridge, a half-deaf old nutter, who seemed to find the habit no more than a harmless chuckle. Local dog walkers disagreed and had banded together to submit their complaints in droves.

Audrey, yet to encounter the cat, harboured secret hopes that it might turn out to be Troubled, if only to justify spending so much time chasing this case around. She knocked on Mrs. Berridge's door with a faint feeling of anticipation.

A thin, bespectacled woman in ugly purple knitwear opened the door. Behind her, a large, orange cat with the build of a bulldog sniffed the air and hissed in Audrey's direction.

Audrey couldn't quite help her step back. She gripped her badge and pasted on a smile. "Mrs. Berridge?"

"Tut, Fontaine," Mrs. Berridge said, and picked up the cat. It sort of sagged from her hands, like a sand bag with a bowling ball in one end. Audrey had the urge to warn her that the animal's head was about to drain flat. But the cat only mewled as Mrs. Berridge hugged it and called it a dear, then it pushed out of the door past Audrey's legs when the old woman put it down with an instruction to 'go play'.

"That's 'play' in the sense of terrorising every dog in the neighbourhood?" Audrey asked.

"Don't be silly," Mrs. Berridge said amenably. "He's just a little kitty. He can't really hurt those animals."

Audrey watched the cat lope away, belly low to the ground in a lumbering movement that was deceptively fast, and felt very sorry for anything that got in its way. It looked like a small, furry, ginger tank. It didn't particularly look Troubled, so Audrey sighed and accepted that she was investigating a cat, and also accepted the invitation inside to do the interview with accompanying coffee and cookies.

She kind of wished she hadn't accepted the cookie. She managed to hide most of it in her pocket and pretend she'd enjoyed it. The cookies were, so far as she was concerned, a greater candidate for Troubles being afoot than the scary cat.

The interview was concluded relatively quickly and Mrs. Berridge opened the door to show her out. _Then_, the crazy started in earnest, because _that_... as the door swung open and the daylight and birdsong and cheer outside smacked her in the face... _that_ was definitely a Trouble.

A two dimensional world awaited, cheerfully composed in blocks of solid colour. The grass of the lawn was green and flat with occasional well-defined tufts. Her car was a little bubble-car parody of itself. The sky above was very blue, and filled with solid white clouds that didn't move.

Audrey stood and gaped as Fontaine charged by, chasing a dog twice his size, followed by a yelling man brandishing an empty lead and a fist. Okay, so the cat had pretty much been a cartoon to start with, but this... _this_...

"Do have a good day, Officer Parker," Mrs. Berridge bid her, unconcerned.

"You can't see...?" Audrey turned around and broke off with a groan. Of course not. And now Mrs. Berridge was decidedly 2D, as well, wringing her hands and crunching her false teeth as she tried to smile. Her hair had mysteriously gained cartoon curlers. Audrey looked down at her own hands, which were just the same as ever, but appeared very strange now against the background. "...Never mind. You don't see anything remotely different from a moment ago, do you?"

She backed away from Mrs. Berridge's amicably oblivious expression. Fontaine pelted between her legs, heading back into the house, and a moment later exited again on his hind legs, carrying Mrs. Berridge's rock-like cookies with an anthropomorphic snigger. Audrey watched as Fontaine gave a polite little bow and offered the cookies to dog and owner like a peace offering.

She turned on her heel, deciding she wasn't going to stick around and watch the result, although she couldn't help but notice the birds on a nearby fence were hopping up and down and clapping their wings.

Her car was _flat_. The world in 2D, when Audrey herself remained decidedly 3D, was a peculiar perspective. She cautiously pulled the door open and got in. Everything was still flat, but the angle of its two dimensional plane changed according to her viewpoint. She cringed as she dared to start up the engine.

She instantly had to stop it again to deal with the dazed dog that the _evil, evil_ cat had just led straight into the middle of the road under pretence of helping.

No, Audrey _definitely_ wasn't a cartoons sort of person, and this Trouble couldn't be over soon enough.

* * *

It was the whole town. Of course it was.

Audrey hadn't had nightmares like this, but only because it would never have occurred to her. She was sure she was going to from now on. She got caught up in traffic on Main Street, the tailback caused by the old bangers of vintage motor enthusiasts Joe Wishart and Peter Chevin, which had transformed into _Wacky Races_ style engines of destruction and got all their gadgetry tangled. She wondered if she should take them in for reckless driving, but really, in the middle of all _this_?

The cars behind honked cartoonishly. Audrey declared, "Screw this," and pulled in. At this rate it would be faster to get out and walk.

Coffee and donuts were prevalent in the police station. Cops were lolling around acting like useless cartoon stereotypes. Also, like very annoying cartoon stereotypes in any predominantly male environment, jaws dropped literally, cartoon hearts thumped out of chests, and lips pursed to physically improbable snout-like lengths to wolf whistle at her approach. "Shut up!" Audrey told them. "Get back to work! ..._Stan_?"

"Saved you a donut?" the patrolman offered sheepishly. He held it out in its card tray. Yellow and white sprinkles.

"Okay." Audrey sighed. "I will have the donut." She took it and bit into it with some trepidation, but it turned back into a real donut in her mouth. "Hunh." She supposed that was something. She patted Stan's arm experimentally as she said, "Thanks, Stan."

He didn't turn back into a real person, and she rolled her eyes as his knees turned weak and he unravelled to the floor.

Audrey hadn't any good reason to expect that Nathan would escape the effects of this Trouble, and there was a big clue on his office door that he had not. The name sign, now reading 'Detective Numbty', caused her to wince in sympathy. Prepared as she was, she walked into their office and then stopped, stunned beyond words by the travesty sitting at her partner's desk.

It was... an _accurate_ rendition of Nathan's more prominent features, but it managed to be remarkably charmless at the same time. A great deal of him seemed to be stubble and chin. For a long moment, she just stood and stared.

"Parker, partner!" he exclaimed. If that was a catch-phrase, she was going to strangle it out of him. "I got him! Finally, I got him! He walked into the station and handed himself in, just ten minutes ago. Whoo-hoo!" He did a little celebratory dance that Audrey was never going to forget, _ever_.

Then she turned and saw who he was jubilantly pointing at.

"Duke!" she exclaimed, jolting with surprise. Duke was sitting handcuffed in the visitor chair, looking vaguely stunned, too. There were a trio of coffees from the _Gull_ on her desk, so Audrey reasoned that he'd come bearing gifts for their mid-morning break right before the Trouble kicked in. "Oh my God."

He scowled at her, shiftily. His eyebrows, which had always been thick, dark and devilishly angled, had become the epitome of cartoon evilness, along with his dark facial hair. His ensemble, which was the same as it had been this morning, just flatter - knitwear, check shirt and calf-length pants - was somehow just _shiftier_. He flexed his cuffed hands at her in an innocent-but-definitely-trying-it-on gesture of 'please free me'.

"Nathan, let him go!" Audrey scolded, outraged. "I thought you two were past this!"

"B-but Audrey, he's the notorious felon, Duke Crooked!"

...Of course he was. Audrey rolled her eyes.

"Only the bane of my existence, the man I've been trying to catch for nearly twenty years!"

She couldn't help but snort with laughter, because boy, that part was right.

"Can someone explain why I just walked into a police station?" Duke asked plaintively. "This has got to be a Trouble. Right?"

"So you still know about the Troubles?" Audrey looked between the two men, who eyed her like she was the strange one.

"Well, sure, Audrey," Duke said. "I help you even though I keep telling you I don't want to help. I almost got aged to death by a siren, who now lives in a lighthouse."

"Of course I know," Nathan said, almost on top of Duke's words. "You're my partner. We've solved dozens of Troubles together. Although... you keep making me work with this felon, and I don't know why."

They didn't quite seem to grasp how their stories didn't tally with their claimed reality. Duke and Nathan regarded each other uncomfortably and expressions of strangeness passed over their faces, perhaps at the memory of things they did together that their cartoon selves _really_ weren't ready for. They looked away again quickly.

"Well, this is a Trouble." Audrey leaned over Nathan's desk and made a grab for his handcuff keys. He clutched them away from her, his face a literal picture. "Nathan, damn it! We can't lock Duke up. We need his help to fix this. You know... like usual?" She reached out to curl her hand on his shoulder, her fingers brushing his bare neck.

He pretty much jumped straight up, flailed out all his limbs, and tossed the keys in the air. He landed on his back with a thud. Solid puffs of grey dust wafted outward from the force of the landing. Audrey grabbed the keys before they could fall on his head.

"I'm all right! I didn't even feel it!" Nathan's higher-pitch cartoon voice rose defiantly. He shot back to his feet... "Aw, durn it!"

Audrey was already turning back to Duke with the keys in hand, so she saw the problem at the same time as Nathan's dismayed cry hit the air.

Duke was gone. Where he'd been sitting, there was only a pair of handcuffs and a bent out of shape paperclip. The closing door of the office travelled its last inch or so and clunked to.

* * *

Audrey wanted to put an end to this Trouble, but she needed her lovers on-side helping her navigate this new, wacky world to do it. After all, _they_ were the ones who knew about cartoons. They knew the _rules_.

"You need to believe me, this is a Trouble," she said to Nathan as his Bronco trundled along to the marina. The Bronco was quite charming in bright blue 2D, but she was sure that Nathan in his right mind would have been horrified. "You always believe me that it's a Trouble. Remember? Because _I'm_ the one who's immune. So _I_ can see when things are screwed up, when you guys can't."

"I, I, I _do_," he asserted. She did wish that cartoon Nathan wasn't quite so hapless. "I always believe you. But, Audrey, where's the Trouble?"

Audrey huffed. "I told you, _you_ can't see it. Do you remember this morning, when we watched cartoons?"

His expression crunched. "Duke..." he murmured. Then he almost put the Bronco into a streetlamp.

"Okay!" Audrey yelped. "Don't try to remember this morning!" Apparently that was a step too far for Duke and Nathan's Trouble-distorted relationship. "But you _have_ to remember cartoons? All your stupid DVDs!"

A quizzical look crossed Nathan's face. "Cartoons are funny and harmless, and nothing but good-natured, Audrey."

"Apart from all the _mindless violence_," she griped back, but that had at least sounded more like Nathan, and a continuation of any number of past arguments. She shook her head and forced herself back to the point. "Well, we're _in_ a cartoon, Nathan. Haven has become a cartoon."

He laughed at her. "That's absurd. Everything's just the way it's always been. If this was a cartoon..." He pulled a face. "Well, we'd just _know_."

Audrey growled in frustration, but they were almost at the _Cape Rouge_. As soon as they got out, she would be free to bring up the subject of Duke again, and once she pushed there, she was pretty sure she'd have him. His cartoon-addled brain seemed to find it impossible to reconcile his relationship with Duke with his place in Haven's cartoon world. For that matter, she wondered if he clearly remembered his relationship with her, right now. Perhaps it was some sort of cartoonish sanitization that couldn't handle threesomes or men sleeping with men, and not the fact Detective Numbty's relationship with Duke Crocker revolved around arrest warrants.

No sooner had Nathan pulled up than his door was open and he was off, scooting across to the _Cape Rouge_ with a shout of, "There he is, that crooked fiend!"

"Nathan!" Audrey yelled. "Nathan, damn it, you put that gun away! If you kill Duke, I will never forgive you!" She chased after him, feeling a lot like she'd been roped into being part of the cartoon herself. She spared half a second to look down at her body to check, and was very relieved to find herself still three-dimensional.

She turned onto the main part of the deck from the walkway along the side, only to skid to a halt - with her own freakin' _sound effect_ - and stare at the appalling tableau in front of her. Duke Crooked was hunched behind a pile of crates, peeping up and ducking down like he was taunting the armed Detective Numbty closer. Unseen by Nathan, a net full of fish was hanging on a hook several feet above his head, and Duke was teasing the end of a rope with one tugging hand.

Audrey had yet to see Duke catch any fish in the _Rouge_, but the fact the fish had no business being there was less important than the fact Nathan was about to get several hundred pounds of them on his _head_.

"Nathan!" Audrey screamed in warning, and dived in as Duke's tugging finally unhooked the rope. Duke's horror in the instant he saw he was about to get not just Nathan, but her too, literally froze on his face.

The fish were spilling out of the net as it fell and about a third of them slapped down over Audrey's head and shoulders in succession, pressing her to the deck. The heavier bulk of the net landed on Nathan with a loud thunk, spread-eagling him face-down beneath it on the deck next to her.

One last fish smacked Audrey on the head as she lifted it, and she slapped it away. "Nathan! Nathan, talk to me!" That had surely been more than enough weight to do serious damage. She grabbed for the net, trying to haul it away from him.

"I'm all right! Didn't even feel it!" Nathan's thready voice arose, muffled by fish. Audrey heaved at the net, cartoon Nathan sat up, and the large, metal hook that had held the net up bounced off his head. "...Urgle. Even _I_ felt that!"

_That_ was the catchphrase, Audrey thought grimly.

"Nathan." She scrambled to him, hands going to his head looking for blood, but there was none. She only scared away a trio of chirping birds circling his skull. "Oh, thank goodness." She realised that it really _hadn't_ done any damage - _not_ just because he couldn't feel it, but because it was a freakin' cartoon. People _didn't_ die, or even really get injured. They just got tweeting birds or stars spinning around their heads.

"Gosh, durn it, Mr. Crooked!" Nathan hollered, scrambling to his feet despite her hauling on him. It was difficult to get a good hold on his textureless arms. "You're under arrest for non-payment of one hundred and sixty two parking tickets, and two counts of public nudity!"

"That wasn't me!" Duke shot back shiftily.

"_That's_ his crime?" Audrey demanded. "The '_notorious criminal_'?"

Duke ducked as Nathan cocked his gun. "No, wait... one of them might have been me." His head popped back up, frowning. "No, you're right. That was me."

Nathan shot him before Audrey had time to shout. The gun ejected a jagged visual 'BANG' effect in yellow and red and a very slow bullet that bowled Duke head over heels and out from his hiding place in the crates. He got the cheeping birds, too, but they flew away when they saw Audrey hurrying to check him out. Duke stayed down. He... seemed to be alive, so far as Audrey could tell. When she backed off, looking helplessly to Nathan, one of the birds returned and resumed its orbit of Duke's head, moving in slow circles.

Dazed. Right.

"Parker..." Detective Numbty sounded suddenly hushed and out of character as his blunt, pink fingers reached out for her face. At first she couldn't imagine what he was doing, let alone what about her could make him look so horrified after he had just freakin' _shot_ Duke. Then he said, "You're... _hurt_."

"Oh. I..." She reached up and touched her chin, where it had been bounced against the deck by the force of falling fish. It stung, but her shoulders hurt worse. She was going to be black and blue. At least the benefit of cartoon fish seemed to be that they didn't stink. "It's just a graze, Nathan."

"No, you're..." Nathan was really looking at her intently, and it seemed like he'd lost the ability to vocalize just exactly what he wanted to say. "You're _hurt_."

Oh... _oh_! Audrey grabbed him. "Yes! Because I'm _not a cartoon_, Nathan! And real people don't just get tweeting birds when they get knocked in the head. They get bruises and blood and concussion, do you understand? So what's happening here, to you, and to Duke, and even to the _Rouge_..." For that matter, even the sea was flat and blue, with a few humps for water close-up, but they were not really moving. Haven seemed to have been drawn by a very lazy animator. "_This_ is a Trouble," she concluded triumphantly.

He nodded, but still looked lost. "I believe you, Parker. You're always right. But... I still can't see it."

Audrey sighed. "Please, Nathan, come back. This is your thing. You're the cartoon guy. I need your help to figure out how to fix this." She steeled herself to crane up and kiss the unreal, unlovable features of Detective Numbty, catching his mouth in a kiss that was definitely not G-rated cartoon friendly. He made a muffled noise of surprise and she caught his stubbled, ridiculous chin in both hands to stop him pulling away. After a moment, she felt him give in to it, sinking into her and curling his arms around her waist. She _felt_ when the semblance of life re-entered him...

...But when they finally pulled apart, he still looked like a cartoon. There was definitely something about him that was _closer_ to being Nathan; the caricature of his face, and his stick-like body, both seemed to have more substance and resemblance to reality.

"I felt _that_," he breathed. His voice was back to normal. From the depth and the intelligence in his eyes now, so was a lot else.

"Good," said Audrey, pulling at his hands affectionately, feeling only a minor sting in her eyes that she hurriedly blinked away. She had her partner back. She had someone else halfway-sane to talk to in this crazy world. "I'm glad. But I still can't _believe_ that you _actually_ shot Duke."

Nathan eyed the fallen felon, not completely shocked or sorry. "We need to take him in to the station."

Audrey glared at him.

"To... bring him around," Nathan amended, obviously battling against something, as his words stumbled and slowed, "so he can help fight the Trouble." He frowned. "We could probably bring him around here, too." He picked up his handcuffs and looked at them, longingly, before he mournfully made himself start to put them away.

Audrey looked between the cuffs and Duke, and remembered his previous swift exit. "Hell, he tipped fish on me," she decided. "You can totally cuff him, just this once."

* * *

They got Duke down into the galley of the _Cape Rouge_, where they arranged him more comfortably on a couch and tried to figure things out. Nathan was increasingly blinking around with incredulity as he gained more awareness of just how screwed up everything had become.

"How're we going to bring around Duke?" he asked. "In the get-him-back-to-normal sense, I mean... or sort of normal, I guess that would be, since I'm still like this." He flailed his long arms. "I figure a bucket of cold water will see to the other thing."

"Hah," Audrey said, and tapped her foot, thinking. Then, she reached out and flicked Duke's still slowly rotating coma-bird away, letting him start to wake groggily. "I figure some locking of lips between the two of you should bring him _around_."

Nathan flushed, cartoon style, the line of red rising to the top of his face like it was filling up as he contemplated Duke with an apprehension which didn't fit at all with some of the things Audrey _knew_ they'd got up to, _many times_, before now. Audrey's face must have given her away. He turned from Duke to ask, "What?"

She held up her palms innocently. "You should see what you look like right now, Wuornos, that's all."

"I don't think I want to," he muttered, and got down on one knee next to Duke on the couch. "Why do I feel like I'm breaking the rules?"

"I'm guessing this Trouble still has its hooks into you at least a little bit," Audrey mused, then grinned suddenly. "But c'mon and make like a fairy tale prince, Nathan. Though I don't _think_ I've seen any Disney here so far..."

Duke Crooked was already struggling muzzily back to consciousness, his big eyelids trying to rise and flopping down again after lifting only the tiniest crack. When Nathan's lips descended over his, Duke's eyes flew very wide.

There was resistance for, oh, about half a second. Less time than Nathan had fought Audrey's kiss. Duke's shoulders squirmed under Nathan's hands, then he grabbed onto Nathan with enthusiasm, cuffed hands wrapping in his collar and hauling him closer, and even hooked a leg up off the couch to wrap around Nathan's waist.

Several minutes later, it was Nathan who was flailing and struggling to break the embrace.

He finally wrenched free and staggered in circles a few times before turning back to demand, irritably, "Are you cured?"

"Holy crap, Nathan, what the hell do you _look like_?" Duke jolted to a sitting position on the couch and looked wildly around the room, down at his own hands, then at Audrey, who stood watching all of this with her arms folded, entertained despite herself.

"I think that's a 'yes'," she said.

"What did this crazy town do to us now? No... don't even bother. We are so far past the point where I really need to stop being surprised." Duke's face screwed up. His features had softened indefinably, no longer quite such a summation of cartoon evil. "...Why am I cuffed?"

"You dropped fish on me," Audrey said tartly. "And also, Nathan appears to be experiencing a heightened urge to bondage you due to his cartoon brainwashing."

Nathan flushed again, and Duke stared in the same amazement Audrey had felt a few minutes earlier. "What the f..." Duke stopped. He looked around in growing horror. His head whipped in all directions, helped by a quirky and dramatic sound effect. "...What the hell happened to my _boat_?!"

"We'll fix it," Audrey said, and grimaced. "You should see Nathan's car."

* * *

Nathan was reluctantly persuaded to let Duke out of the cuffs, although Audrey could see it went against his cartoon-skewed nature. Duke claimed a kiss from Audrey, too, "to make up for kissing the monstrosity of cartoon Nathan," and then they headed back into town, Duke and Nathan inevitably arguing about 'the rules' on the way.

"Audrey's scraped up and bruised from you dropping the fish on our heads," Nathan said, glaring at Duke, "But I don't have a mark on me. Even that egg on your head has gone down, now."

"Looney Tunes rules, huh?" Duke caught. "But you still can't feel, right? This Trouble didn't do anything to interfere with yours?"

"The name on his office door changed to 'Detective Numbty'," Audrey said.

"Oh, that is just..." A blissful look took over Duke's features.

"Can it, _Duke Crooked_," Nathan snapped. "At least I didn't end up looking like Dick Dastardly's long-lost brother."

"Anyway," Duke moved on swiftly. "If you're still numb, we'd have to check to know for sure that you're not hurt. Who knows how injury might show up on cartoon you."

The scuffle that followed had Audrey diving from the passenger seat for the wheel as Duke grabbed at Nathan's clothes. Little puffs of smoke and text sound effects were still flying as she stabbed her foot across to the brake and screeched them to a halt.

"Okay," she said, taking a deep breath. "You guys need to figure out the rules. Because you guys know cartoons, whereas my brain shuts down on what I'm watching when I see a bipedal rabbit, and I start thinking about serial killers instead. But can you _please_ do it without fighting? It's only the effect of the Trouble, so you guys need to resist! You're never this bad anymore."

"Well, it seems like we can't be hurt," Duke huffed, examining himself where Nathan had got a few licks in.

"Cartoons are... cartoons," Nathan said, helplessly. "Everything runs on exaggeration, but no one actually gets hurt. The cat never eats the canary. If he catches him, he no longer knows what to do. The farmer cries if he ever thinks he's actually killed the rabbit."

"So it's exaggerated and it's softened," Duke picked up. "No way you'd cry if you actually arrested me, right?" He poked Nathan in the shoulder.

"Unlikely." They scowled at each other over Duke's finger as it kept jabbing, until Nathan gave up and slapped his hand away. Audrey wedged her shoulder between them before they could start all over again.

"It's an ideal world," Nathan said. "These rules can't work in the real world. People would never get anything done."

"Yeah," Duke agreed. "It's carrot and stick, forever and ever. People locked in patterns. Chasing what they want. And they'll never get it because it's never really what they want." He poked Nathan again.

"Please stop," Audrey groaned.

Duke looked pensively out of the window and shuddered at the sight of Haven's citizens going about their two dimensional life. "People weren't meant to live like this. Look how it's distorted _us_. Nathan's chin is particularly horrible."

"Your eyebrows," Nathan countered.

"Shut up!" said Audrey. "Both of you shut up. We need to get to the station. Nathan, please just drive, or I will."

They headed up Main Street, only to find a ruckus of another sort. A couple of neighbouring store owners were arguing. The greasy spoon and the deli had always had a sort of rivalry, and now big Eddie and skinny Pat were out front in aprons, wielding a spatula and a rolling pin at each other.

Audrey's headache pounded. She supposed they really _did_ have to deal with this.

Ten minutes later, they walked into the police station. Audrey was nursing another bruise on her head where the rolling pin had bounced off, whereas Nathan's face was covered in distinctive red imprints in the shape of the spatula and Duke had new eggs all over his skull. Both of _their_ marks, though, were fast fading.

"There's no point trying to break up the fights," Duke said with exasperation. "They're gonna happen. You won't stop them. Circles upon circles. It's like every obsession, every rivalry, has been amped up to eleven by this Trouble. The rules compel them to do it. You can pull them apart, but they're going to be right back there again ten minutes later."

"I'm getting that," Audrey said, crossly. Her head was now smarting, and her headache hadn't gotten any better, either.

"I... agree with Duke," Nathan said, sounding like he struggled with the statement. "It goes against everything the police are supposed to stand for, but we have to ignore the... cartoon-level violence, when it breaks out. Our hurts might not last, but yours do. You could be in serious danger through being immune to the rules of this world. If say, a one hundred ton weight, or an anvil were to fall out of the sky..."

"Hey, it's not so wildly unlikely as it might seem," Duke defended hastily, seeing Audrey's expression. "Nathan or I would just... re-inflate, or something, but you'd be crushed."

"...Okay." She breathed and counted slowly to ten. "That would be messy." She stopped and glared at the cartoon coffee machine, then grabbed a cup. Hell with it. The coffee turned back from a brown 2D disc into a liquid again when she sipped it. All this, and the world was _not_ going to deny her coffee. "What we need to do is stop this Trouble at its source. So we need to figure out whose Trouble it is, so we can find them and talk them down."

"Easier said than done," Nathan groaned. "It could be anyone."

"Well, yeah, it _could_ be anyone, but it's not _likely_ to be anyone," Duke said. "It's _likely_ to be someone for whom cartoons are a meaningful medium. I'd be looking at you, Nate, if you weren't Troubled already."

"Shh!" Audrey held up a finger between them to ward off another fight, and handed off cartoon coffees to each. Maybe if their hands were full... "Okay, so who's likely to have this Trouble. A kid?"

"Kids like cartoons," Nathan agreed cagily, as if he thought there was a criticism buried in there, "traditionally."

"Yeah, but these are _old_ cartoons," Duke countered. "Don't you think that the whole concept of this world, these rules, feels more dated? It's not like the Japanese stuff with the little cutesy monsters everywhere and kids shouting, for example. It's not even really like the newer Western animation."

Nathan turned his nose up. "Everyone knows Bugs Bunny. Whereas most of the last thirty years in animation is-"

"Okay, okay, spare the lecture." Duke half threw up his hands. He shook his head. "It figures that even cartoons are serious business to you. But back to the point, _if_ we're talking vintage cartoons, this is probably not a kid. This is someone from our generation, or older."

"Maybe," Nathan said, a bit sourly. "It's _not me_."

"That's really not what I'm trying to get at here, Nate."

Audrey herded them toward their office. In the bullpen, HPD officers were flicking paper airplanes made from official files, and there were Yet More Donuts. The cops were always useless in cartoons. "We need to find this person. So you guys need to think," she declared. "Troubles normally have a trigger. What sort of trigger could lead to a world of cartoons? What's special about cartoons that makes them preferable to the real world, for this Troubled person?"

"Maybe he or she desperately wants to return to their childhood," Duke said, poking Nathan again.

Nathan growled and shoved him. He caught himself and said, "Cartoons are comforting. Nothing ever changes. You know all the rules. The status quo holds, no matter what." Something about that being his first thought made Audrey eye him in a new sort of light.

"And horrible things happen constantly," she couldn't help but add sarcastically.

"But no one ever actually _dies_," Nathan shot back.

Audrey's breath caught. "Oh, _wait_..."

"No one dies," Duke summed up. "No one gets hurt. Everything stays the same. It's the ultimate comfort world."

"We're probably looking at someone who's lost someone," Nathan said. He slid into place behind his computer and started tapping away. "We ought to look at accident and death reports from the last few days." He broke off into a curse, and slammed his fist on the keyboard. "How am I supposed to find anything on _this_?"

Audrey peeked around the screen and saw it was massively pixellated, with about three words per line, the most basic of cartoon computers. She winced. "Maybe print out? It _might_ be better..."

Nathan stood up instead. "I'll go ask the Chief. He usually knows everything that's going on at any given time."

The door swung shut after him and Audrey grimaced. "Have you or he seen the Chief since all of this began?" she asked Duke.

"Uh, no." From the trepidation creasing his cartoon forehead, Duke was having the same sort of thoughts she was. He scooted to the door in pursuit of Nathan. "Nathan, _wait_!"

Too late. Following Duke, Audrey saw over his shoulder that Nathan already stood gaping in the doorway of Garland Wuornos' office. Muffled shouting emanated from there, along with wafts of... smoke? Audrey and Duke nervously shuffled up behind Nathan in time to catch the last few words of the diatribe from the grizzled, hot-tempered, chain-smoking dwarf who stomped back and forth behind the Chief's desk: "...and _man up_, Nathan! It'll be your duty to protect Haven one day, and God help this town then...!"

Duke said, "I'm not kissing him."

Audrey and Nathan both cast him freaked looks at the mental image that produced.

"...Dad," Nathan said tightly, stubbornly holding to the purpose that had brought him there, though Audrey wouldn't have blamed him if he'd turned and fled. "I need to... pick your brain... about some case stuff."

"Well, come in and shut the durn door," Garland growled. "I know for a fact you weren't born in a barn."

Nathan's feet moved reluctantly. The door closed like a trap behind him, slamming with no breeze or hand to push it. Audrey held her breath. From within the room, there were a few ominous slams, more shouting, and Garland definitely discharged his pistol at the ceiling a few times. Then, silence. The seconds ticked by.

"You think we should go in and pull him out?" she asked Duke.

"Hell, no," Duke responded instantly. "Not with Garland turned into some grey-haired, scarier, _crazier_ version of Yosemite Sam. Nathan's on his own. It's _his_ dad."

Audrey suspected Duke's out-for-himself personality streak was heightened by his current condition, but then again, she really didn't feel very much like interfering either. Fortunately, Nathan emerged and solved her dilemma. He weaved on his feet, had a couple of eggs on his head along with ceiling plaster in his hair, and appeared alarmingly singed around the edges.

Duke and Audrey grabbed an arm apiece and hauled his weaving steps back to their office.

"I really hope you got something from that," Audrey said.

"Haven doesn't get many violent deaths," Nathan said, heaving a long breath, "Troubles aside. But it had one last night. A fifteen year old kid, Shawn Claypool, was mown down by a hit-and-run driver. I'm guessing that's too close to be coincidence."

Audrey nodded slowly. "Let's start with the family."

* * *

They managed to dig up a few reports they could make sense of, Audrey and Nathan working while Duke interjected occasional snark and tapped his fingers on the desk in his usual indispensable way. He wasn't employed by HPD, but Audrey wasn't letting him out of her sight while this Trouble was in force, and Nathan got... jittery... with Duke out of his sight while this Trouble was in force. Duke didn't want to be anywhere else, either, judging by how he even trailed them without complaint to the morgue to check if Eleanor could fill in more details.

The victim's father, Donald Claypool. wasn't answering his phone, and couldn't be reached. "Single dad," Eleanor said, who was even more brusque than usual and happily juggling with sharp-edged coroner's equipment, but at least not so scary as cartoon Garland. "Identified the body of his only son and went home. If he's fallen off the radar, I'd say that's cause for alarm."

"All right," Audrey said as they left the morgue building, "I am seriously worried about this man, cartoon Trouble or no cartoon Trouble. I say we need to get over to this address, now."

They reached the Claypool house to find the car engine running in the garage and the doors overspilling fumes, but car and garage were empty of Claypool. Duke and Nathan staggered about red in the face and wheezing after their foray to investigate and switch the engine off, but not really any the worse for wear. Their cartoon bodies shrugged it off in about ten seconds.

Further into the house, on the stairwell, a noose hung empty. As they stood exchanging horrible, puzzled glances, a shot rang out, and they pounded up the stairs, following the source of the sound.

A man sat at the end of a bed with his head a charred-black cartoon parody of receiving a shotgun point-blank to the face, hair stuck out all angles, white eyes blinking from the soot. He 'ulped' and jumped up as they ran in, and shook his head fiercely. That returned it into the face of a fortyish blonde man, strained and grief-stricken. "It's not working!" he wailed, holding his head. "Why isn't it working?!"

"Aw, _man_," Duke said, stepping toward the devastated father and extending a hand to grip his shoulder. "Come on, man. Come with us. We'll find you some help."

* * *

"I think we can all agree that this isn't Claypool's Trouble," Audrey said, later. "Our Troubled person is obsessed with a world where nobody can be hurt. Claypool's wishes... don't match the profile." She was met by Duke and Nathan's nods and sighs.

They had left Claypool in an interview room at the police station, with Eleanor Carr, a heavily sugared coffee and a large pile of donuts. Much as they'd prefer him to be with psychiatric professionals, no one was holding high hopes for Haven's mental health services under the effects of the current Trouble. Even Audrey remembered what _they_ were like in cartoons, and Eleanor was at least a medical expert who was still relatively sane and competent.

They'd retreated to the bakery to regroup. Haven Joe was fatter, and his hair curlier, and his face smilier than the regular version, but his lattes were still just as good, once they hit Audrey's tongue and became, well, _liquid_ again.

"I have no idea how I'm drinking this," Nathan said dourly, glancing down at his cup-of-brown-disc.

"No, it's weird," Duke agreed. "It's not so much coffee as _essence_ of coffee. Or... basic _coffee_-ness of coffee."

"Does it feel wet?" Nathan asked, with morbid curiosity.

"It..." Duke screwed up his face and regarded it through narrowed eyes. He shook his head. "I have no idea. I'm not too sure _I'm_ 'feeling' normally at the moment, as a matter of fact. All the beat-downs didn't really hurt. Not _hurt_ hurt."

"Huh." Nathan palmed Duke's hand surreptitiously on the table, where they bodies blocked the view from most of the other patrons. He brushed his blunt thumb over the textureless skin on the back of Duke's hand. "Feel that?"

"Yeah, I feel that," Duke said, and tightened his own fingers. "I guess I'm sorry I tried to kill you with fish. Even if it wouldn't have really killed you."

"And, uh, about shooting you..."

They looked at each other, and Nathan didn't actually, physically apologise, which was something he got away with a lot, but the silence extended so long this time that Audrey gave in to the temptation to spare him and placed her hand on top of both of theirs.

"Do you feel that?"

"_Yes_," both men said, with undue intensity.

"Okay," Duke added, "what's weird now is that my hand feels sort of normal, and if I squint at it while you're holding it, I think I might start to see lines, and freckles, and veins beneath the skin."

"I can just feel my hand," Nathan said. "Maybe it's a bit more distant than usual. It's a bit hard to tell, when most of the time there's nothing."

Audrey secretly loved the certain way Duke's eyes melted when Nathan said things like that. It was even more pronounced when they were cartoons.

She lifted her hand from theirs, and unintentionally matched the timing of her sigh with Nathan's. "So," she said, making herself focus, "If not Claypool, then who? Is this lead really a dead end? I suppose Shawn Claypool's father wouldn't be the only one who's mourning."

"He had no siblings," Nathan said, "and his mother died years ago. She was estranged from her family, who live at the other end of the country. That's why Donald's so completely devastated. Shawn was everything he had."

"What about his friends at school? Fifteen, right? He's got to have had school friends," Audrey said.

"From the way his dad talked, he was a bit of a loner." Duke had talked more to Claypool than Audrey or Nathan - and the guy had looked mostly weirded out by someone with such obviously evil characteristics displaying such compassion. "But there is one other person who'd be devastated by Shawn Claypool's death - the driver who killed him."

Audrey almost finished the sentence with him, and from the sharp lift of Nathan's head, he'd caught on just as fast. "Shit," she said. "This is why Haven needs more traffic cameras."

"Haven needs traffic cameras, period," Nathan corrected.

"It really doesn't," Duke countered.

Both cops glared at him.

"...Because I'm sure this guy was a total anomaly and no one else in town would ever dream of breaking traffic laws," Duke finished hastily.

"Nice save," Audrey said wryly. "Okay, so what do we have? Eyewitness description?"

"Might've been a blue van." Nathan filled in. "Or possibly a black one. Witness didn't catch the plates, didn't actually see the van hit the kid, just saw it driving away."

"Well, there aren't that many blue vans around," Audrey grumped. "At least it's a start."

"It's going to be just great trying to go through the vehicle registration database while we're stuck with the world like this." Nathan drained the last of his black coffee and stood up.

"Or we could go ask Vince and Dave," Duke suggested. "...What? Even if their computers are as messed up as yours are, they've met - read 'harassed or annoyed' - just about everyone in town over the years. Most vans belong to small businesses, who the newspaper interacts with for advertising revenue. If they don't know the van, then they might know the Trouble."

"So long as cartoon Vince is nowhere near as scary as cartoon Garland, I'm in," Audrey said, eying Nathan, who shivered on cue, an icicle forming on his nose.

"It's got to be worth a try," Duke said. He stood up to join Nathan, delivering a pat on the arm that he was sure to make audible so Nathan would notice. "Besides, they like you. In a super-creepy, creepy-old-man kind of way... And okay, _now_ I feel bad about suggesting this."

* * *

Cartoon Teagues, Audrey realised belatedly as they drove to the _Haven Herald_ office, might actually be a hitherto unknown secret horror of hers. She kept having flashes of the two of them with bedazzled grins and shiny spectacle lenses, speaking in unison - okay, so breaking that occasionally to argue with each other - patting her arm, and enthusing over her in even more patronising ways than their usual.

Fortunately, the reality proved nowhere near so horrible. Possibly the Teagues brothers were well enough known in town that familiarity had overridden cartoon cliché. Possibly, it was just that they'd always been close to cartoons already. Vince was curly haired and over-large, sporting a baffled expression as he enthusiastically ruffled the pages of a notebook. Dave was small and did have shiny spectacles, but also blinked a lot behind them. He still cracked bad jokes, mostly at his brother's expense.

"You guys!" Audrey could almost hug them. After the efforts she'd had to go to, to get anything resembling normal behaviour out of Nathan and Duke... "I am so, so glad that you're... almost normal."

Dave looked at Vince sidelong and snerked, "Well, we don't get that every day. How's about that, Vince? Almost normal!"

"Oh, I disagree," Vince returned, shaking his head and peering worriedly at Audrey. "What's the matter, Audrey? You seem... different, somehow." He wrinkled his nose.

"You're the ones who're different," Audrey said. "But never mind that. We need to know about a blue, or possibly black, van. And a cartoon Trouble."

"That sounds rather vague," Dave opined. "What cartoon? I always liked that _South Park_."

In the background, Nathan definitely turned his nose up.

"More like making regular people into a cartoon," Audrey said. "Not any particular cartoon. Like, someone's Trouble rewrote the whole world with this weird, wacky made-up one from things on TV."

"You guys really can't see it?" Duke poked.

The Teagues shot him baffled looks, and Dave said to Audrey, "Well, I've never heard of anything like _that_. Though, there was one time in 1983 when the whole town went in for a Jane Austen theme weekend in a really big way..." He chuckled and shook his head.

Vince nudged him hard with an elbow. "That was _exactly_ like it, you old fool! You know how the Troubles work!"

Dave nudged him back, and by the time the scuffle escalated to Acme cannons and giant harpoons produced mysteriously from the air, Audrey had figured out that the Teagues _hadn't_ escaped the effects of the cartoonish warping. Duke and Nathan grabbed a Teague each and dragged them apart.

"Okay, Vince and Duke! Jane Austen weekend!" Audrey ordered. "How did it start? Whose fault was it? What do we know? Nathan, take Dave and go quiz him on the van!"

Nathan pulled Dave out onto the _Herald's_ long porch to do that. The brothers kept glaring daggers at each other until Nathan dragged Dave around and placed his back to the window. The last few daggers dropped harmlessly mid-flight.

Audrey held her forehead. She wondered if it would be entirely wise to take cartoon Tylenol.

"Jane Austen weekend?" Vince perked up when Duke shook him. "Hoo, boy! That was fun! I looked good as a dandy."

"I'm, uh, sure you did." Duke looked horrified. "But what caused the town to go period-drama? You're not seriously going to tell us this is one of those Troubles that happened and resolved and nobody ever freakin' knew the first thing about it? Because we _need_ to get this town back to normal. Before Audrey starts shooting things."

"Oh, no," Vince said. "It was Deacon Flaxborough. Everyone knows that. Biggest Austen fanatic this side of Bangor. Couldn't be anyone else, really."

"Is Flaxborough still around?" Audrey asked.

Vince shook his head. "Died in '04. The Haven '_Darcy and Elizabeth Society_' were waiting with anticipation for his son's Trouble to kick in. That boy's just not got his heart in it, though. Doesn't even go to the meetings any more."

"You read..." Duke started, then shook himself fiercely. "No. _No_. My mental health is better for not knowing. Please don't answer that."

"What's the son's name?" Audrey asked. "And do you know where he lives?"

They turned to the door as Nathan strode in, fists and jaw clenched. "Jonas Flaxborough. '_Flaxible Window Solutions_' on Main Street... I only _know_ the guy. Drives like a maniac. I've given him _tickets_."

Audrey heard the words and knew they were important, but the sight of something else overrode them. Her eyes zeroed in on a red smear on Nathan's wrist. "Nathan! Is that...?"

He raised his hand, halting in surprise. "It looks like blood." He tentatively touched the tip of his tongue to the red patch. "Tastes like it, too. Must've been from the knives flying around."

"We're _cartoons_." Duke started hastily checking himself over, despite his protest. "Cartoons don't bleed, Nathan. It's against the Comics Code or something."

Nathan glared at him. "You're really going to make me explain the difference between comics and animation again?"

"I don't care," Duke grumped. "I _care_ that you're bleeding and you shouldn't be. And that suggests our protection from the rules of this world is getting thinner the longer we stay close to Audrey."

"Duke," Nathan said, exasperated. "It's barely a scratch. We're going to fix this, right now. And nothing is going to happen to anyone."

"You say that," Duke said. "But you know as well as I do that one hundred ton weights can drop from the sky _at any moment_."

* * *

The window shop on Main Street was shut, and the apartment above it looked small for the scion of one of Haven's oldest families, but the two cars parked in front were pretty flash. They had to go down the cramped side road to the back to find the van. It had a business logo on its side, and was dented, with a suspicious stain on the bodywork. It was strange to see such things rendered in the innocent lines of the cartoon world, but of course, the damage had been done before the Trouble and transformation kicked in.

When Audrey looked up from the back of the building, she could see the telltale flickering of a TV around the edges of a curtained window in the small apartment above.

Nathan nodded and took the lead up the exterior wooden staircase that gave direct entry to the apartment. Audrey cursed internally as she realised that letting Nathan take the lead opened them up to background music that screamed 'stealthy advancing' and a couple of dramatic stops and holds at particularly loud scrapes and footfalls.

"Don't blame him," Duke said at her ear, voice low as much to keep the comment from Nathan as anything else. "He's just drawn that way."

She looked back at him blankly.

"...Oh, for _serious_?" Duke groaned, not quietly. "You've never seen '_Who Framed Roger Rabbit_'?" His face brightened abruptly. "Boy, are you in for a treat. I'm pretty sure Nathan has it..."

"_No_," hissed Audrey, with extreme prejudice. "We are not going back to Nathan's tonight, and I am not spending my evening watching cartoons after the day I've had!"

"It's not _strictly_ a cartoon, you know," Duke wheedled. "In fact, it's even relevant to your current situation." He waved his hands vaguely at her three-dimensional body.

Nathan turned back to hush them, brandishing a finger before his lips and generally behaving in a manner that was not stealthy, merely a parody of stealthy.

"Oh, for goodness sake," Audrey sighed. "Just knock on the door. He's guilt-ridden enough to change Haven into a cartoon. He's not going to make a break out of the window. He's not going to put up a fight."

Nathan grimaced, and blinked a few times hard, and shook his head, trying to fight against his cartoon nature. Audrey wondered if he needed his resistance refreshing, but it probably wasn't the place. After a moment, he pulled out his badge and used his free hand to rap on the door. "Mr. Flaxborough... Jonas? It's Nathan Nuh - hrnh! - Nathan _Wuornos_, with Haven PD. I need to speak to you."

"It's open," a despondent voice floated dully to them from inside. Nathan pushed the door inward with a slow, ominous creak. The cartoon sunlight fell into the room, cutting through deep, black shadows, and Audrey peered around Nathan to see the sunbeams strike toward but fail to reach the vaguely human shadow outlined by artificial light from a TV that was showing cartoons - _Road Runner_, at the moment.

The cartoon trappings actually made the setting intensely creepy. Audrey shuddered and moved up beside Nathan, becoming increasingly aware as she advanced that there was something not right about that pool of light around the TV. Duke stayed a pace or two behind them both, better part of valour and all of that.

The dark gathered inside the little circle of space between the TV set and Flaxborough, and within that circle, the man and his immediate surroundings were neither one thing nor the other - not the bright, cheesy type of cartoon that he'd spread over the rest of Haven, but not quite three dimensional reality, in all its many shades, either. Audrey stepped further into the room, and from there could see that the brightness and energy from the cartoon on the screen spilled out from the back of the TV set, overflowing, and crept up under the tightly closed curtains of the window behind it, and out into the world.

A Technicolor world of laughter and lunacy, all powered by one man's despair.

"Jonas," Nathan said, his voice low, coloured with compassion and surprise.

The figure in the armchair twitched and turned to look at Nathan. Its hair was dark and slick to its skull, eyes blinking pools of ink, limbs thin and hunched in on its shape, twisted and miserable. Audrey didn't know what she was looking at, but it was evident Nathan at least recognised something of the man he knew in the creature his Trouble had made of him.

The abject misery in the twisted face was replaced by startled incredulity as he registered Nathan's appearance. "D-detective Wuornos?" Jonas Flaxborough stammered. "Is that really you?"

"Yeah." Nathan's mouth twisted like he'd sucked a lemon. "It is really me. Jonas, we have a... problem."

Despair coiled in and overtook Jonas again. "I know," he said, his shoulders sagging. He extended both wrists, which looked too stretched-out and fleshless to fit handcuffs on. "I won't resist. I killed that boy. You can lock me up."

"This isn't about locking you up." Nathan turned and looked to Audrey.

"Jonas?" Audrey carefully approached the man. She felt like something might happen if she stepped over that threshold into his little circle of twisted reality, but nothing did. She wondered if that would have still been the case had Nathan or Duke led the way. She leaned over the chair. On the TV, the Road Runner manoeuvred Wile E. Coyote under another heavy falling object. Maybe Duke had been right about that one. "Do you know what's going on here?" She watched his face. "You saw Nathan, didn't you? You can see he doesn't look his normal self."

"He looks funny." Even Flaxborough's laughter was despairing, hollow and horrible. He squinted at Duke. "Aren't you the barman from the _Grey Gull_. Wait, wait, I know it... Duke Crocker?"

"That's me," Duke agreed, sombre.

"You... look funny, too." Flaxborough turned to the TV, with its bright cartoons, looking between it and the two men. "I... this... what's going on?"

There was more intelligence and curiosity animating him, bringing more life back in with it. Audrey could see he'd made the connection. She said, "You did this, Jonas. It's _okay_," she added quickly - guilt was the trigger for his Trouble, and she didn't need to pile more of it on and risk making things worse. "But we need you to put everything back, so the world can move forward."

"Put what back?" Flaxborough asked, confused, and Audrey walked to the curtains and threw them open.

The light spilled in. Birds chirped. A smiling sun came out from behind a cloud. Somehow, it was possible to hear distant singing. Flaxborough cringed from it like a vampire. So did Audrey, a bit.

"_No_," she said to it all, positively. "_Go away_."

The sun quickly spun its face to the other side to hide it, and the birds flew off. The singing stopped sharply, like someone had yanked the needle on an old record player.

They were still left with a tableau onto the street below of Fontaine the cat happily chasing a bulldog, the animal control officer chasing the cat with a net, Joe and Pete's cars disintegrating and causing havoc, and a random little old lady beating another pedestrian with her handbag - with all the while, Vince and Dave standing looking on holding camera and notebook.

Flaxborough sat forward and gaped. "Haven is..." His voice dried to a whisper. "But that's _amazing_."

"That's one way of putting it," Duke remarked.

"I started thinking... if only things worked out like _that_, really." Flaxborough was pointing at the TV, where Wile E. Coyote proceeded to survive a myriad of fatal or crippling blows in succession. "That boy would still be alive."

"But he's _not_ alive," Audrey said, "and this isn't amazing." She knelt down, leaning her elbows on the arm of the chair to talk to Flaxborough face-to-face. It seemed to her that the longer their conversation went on, the more normal he looked. "People need to be free to live their lives, even if that comes with the risk of dying. Not... not running around in endless circles. Look at what this _does_ to people, Jonas. Everyone's stuck in stock phrases and crazy habits and twisted all up into a parody of themselves. And Shawn Claypool is still dead. Although," she added grimly, "you saved his father's life, if that helps."

Flaxborough eased back in the chair. He looked almost like a young man again, the shadows hanging over his limbs transformed into a dark work overall, the hair starting to re-inflate from his skull into a brown mop. "I really did all this? But... but what about Jane Austen? Dad always said the Society would be relying on me for their Grand Weekend when he was gone. He read the books to me, right from when I was small."

"Obviously your Trouble manifested itself in a different way," Nathan said, frowning.

Flaxborough nodded, acceptingly, apparently fairly neutral on that particular subject. His eyes travelled back and stuck on the vision out of the window. He sighed. "It was a nice dream, but I don't really want to live in a cartoon, either."

He groped for the TV remote in the depths of the armchair, extended it, and turned the television off.

* * *

Audrey suspected that her lovers were still a bit shell-shocked by the transformation back from life in 2D. At least, they had been big with the staring and not saying very much in the car on the way back to the station. Nathan frowned at the road ahead while his hands mechanically moved on the controls, and Duke sprawled in the passenger seat next to him, occasionally twitching and sitting up like he was going to say something, but then subsiding without saying anything at all. Audrey had travelled in the back, still attempting to comfort the Troubled Jonas Flaxborough.

She supposed it might be a shock, which elements came to the fore, when you were reduced to a two-dimensional caricature of yourself.

She didn't have time to really talk to Nathan and Duke back at the station, either, through dealing with Flaxborough, and as soon as she finally thought she was free and clear, the Chief called them into his office.

The Chief wasn't happy, but Audrey had never been cowed by Garland Wuornos before and the only reason the very smallest of nervous shudders travelled down her spine now was due to the memory of how scary he'd been as a cartoon.

"So, someday, someone's gonna explain to me in some sort of a rational way why you left a suicidal man with the coroner?" Garland griped, scowling at the three of them from beneath a harshly lowered bushy eyebrow.

Nathan looked shamefaced, despite the fact they'd all agreed at the time that there was no other rational choice, and even Audrey felt in retrospect that it might have been a little... inappropriate. "Sorry," she settled for. "It seemed like the best option available at the time."

Apparently Garland caught more from their shuffling and guilty looks than she'd anticipated. "I'm not gonna like this if you try explain it further, am I?" He glowered at Duke, who hid behind Nathan. "Aw, hell with it. Get! You know, all three of you, you... _scoot_. Get out of here."

"...Excuse me?" Nathan asked blankly.

Garland scowled all the more for being pressed to go into detail. He jabbed his finger between the three of them. "It doesn't mean I like this 'relationship'. I still think it's disrespectful and it'd have given your mother fits." He was looking at Nathan. "I'm sick of the sight of Crocker hanging around my police station. But if it's what works for you, then it works. Go home. Get some... alone time, or whatever the hell you'd call that when there's three people involved." He jerked his thumb at the door. "I may not know _what_ happened earlier, but I can be sure as hell something did, and you three don't look up to any competent policing for the rest of the day." His face screwed up as he realised what he'd said. "You _two_, God damn it! Take Crocker and go! Don't come back until tomorrow!"

Nathan and Audrey stared at him a moment, then spun, grabbed one of Duke's arms apiece, and made themselves quickly scarce.

"_Don't_ bring Crocker back in to work tomorrow!" The Chief's final belligerent word on the matter followed them out of the door.

* * *

They went home - to Audrey's apartment above the _Grey Gull_. Duke popped down to steal them dinner and a bottle of something with a price tag and alcohol content befitting the day they'd had. He brought it back upstairs and they snuggled on Audrey's couch with the food and the drink, with Audrey in the middle and Duke curling one long arm around all their shoulders from one end. Their bare feet sprawled out in a tangle together on the floor, and Nathan picked up the remote and turned the TV on to watch...

A talk show (Duke). A police procedural (Nathan). A cheesy supernatural romcom (Audrey, sort of... mostly just to torment the boys). And half of a war film that neither Audrey nor Nathan really liked, but was still better than letting Duke return to _Oprah_.

An unspoken agreement hung between all three that, tonight, there would be _no cartoons_.

THAT'S ALL, FOLKS!


End file.
